Still Waters 35,790

Still Waters 35,790

For a nation of animal lovers, it was one of the most gripping whodunnits of the modern era. Reports in November 2015 of cats found mutilated around the Croydon area of south London, with their head and tails removed, sparked media headlines that a “Croydon cat killer” was on the loose and fears the fiend might strike again.

But almost three years on, after postmortems on deceased cats and two rabbits, forensic examinations, DNA tests and the studying of CCTV, Scotland Yard announced that humans were in the clear – and that the most likely culprits were foxes or other scavenging animals.

The initial publicity had encouraged more people to report cases, and the number of mutilated cats soon grew to more than 400 across London and the home counties. Animal welfare experts and a small team of police officers were looking for patterns as the body count mounted.

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Seti42 451

Seti42 451

Well, I'm relieved evidence doesn't point to a serial cat killer. The penalties for torturing and killing house pets are shockingly lax, though. Not sure about the UK, but in the US, you tend get more jail time for being caught with a bag of weed than murdering a cat...That's shameful, IMO.

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seanjo 4,776

seanjo 4,776

Well, I'm relieved evidence doesn't point to a serial cat killer. The penalties for torturing and killing house pets are shockingly lax, though. Not sure about the UK, but in the US, you tend get more jail time for being caught with a bag of weed than murdering a cat...That's shameful, IMO.

Well, I'm relieved evidence doesn't point to a serial cat killer. The penalties for torturing and killing house pets are shockingly lax, though. Not sure about the UK, but in the US, you tend get more jail time for being caught with a bag of weed than murdering a cat...That's shameful, IMO.

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Black Monk 3,849

Black Monk 3,849

Thousands of police manpower hours have been wasted, countless articles have been written, and many online documentaries have been made, over what turned out to be hysteria. No evidence has ever been presented to suggest that a killer was to blame. There was no CCTV, no DNA and no credible eyewitnesses to the killings.

All the police ever had to go on was one vague description, offered by two people to the local press, describing ‘a white man in his forties with short brown hair, dressed in dark clothing, possibly with acne scarring to his face’. (I could go down to my local pub tonight and find at least seven men fitting that description.)

The spectre of a bogeyman seems to have overwhelmed common sense. These mutilations were the work of accidental collisions with cars and foxes looking for an easy lunch. While Brits like to see foxes as adorable Basil Brush-like creatures, they are, in fact, predators and scavengers who have no qualms about devouring your dead pet. In the end, it was fox DNA that was found on the cats’ corpses, and foxes who were caught on CCTV.

The panic over the Croydon Cat Killer is a symptom of a wider problem in society: we see danger and human evil around every corner.

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Bash_ 0

Bash_ 0

"Foxes are natural scavengers and I don't dispute the fact that a lot of activity is down to foxes. What I do dispute is that foxes can cleanly remove heads and tails in a surgical manner."

Dispute it all you like, but foxes actually chew off the heads of their prey first. If you find a headless or tailless carcass then it's almost certainly a fox.

Well just for your information, the vetenarians dispute it.

I don’t get why your so 100% convinced it’s foxes, when the police and vetenarians have been baffled by the case for 3 years, and that the media as made little to no effort to report any details of the investigation...

“In one mutilated cat case, there was a beheading. It was surgical. The wounds were symmetrical and looked as if they had been done with a scalpel.” – Dane Walker, Clinical Director, Streatham Hill Vets, South London, U. K., Sept. 23, 2018